One of the most important parts of running a business, be it a bar or restaurant, is getting people in the door. To attract potential customers, you’ll need to spend some money on marketing. Marketing helps to expose your business to a larger audience, ultimately enticing them to spend money. That being said, it is important to understand the effectiveness of marketing efforts to determine what to spend. Ultimately, you’ll want to look at your return on investment, or ROI. You’ll want to look at the amount of customers you are getting and the revenue you are earning, among other things, to better understand how your marketing campaign is working. There are a number of ways to track your ROI on marketing.

POS Systems

Point-of-sale systems are usually the epicentre of any business. Typically, these systems are how employees take orders and where sales occur. However, they can also provide a plethora of important information. Investing in a good system will allow you to track your sales and ROI. They are capable of creating reports in an instant, allowing you to see what your customers are buying and how much they are spending. Data can be presented a number of ways, from charts to graphs. You’ll also be able to look at individual data points, such as beverages, specific food items, and much more. The number of customers and sales can even be tracked. To determine your ROI, you can link this data to your promotions and marketing campaigns and review their effectiveness.

Manual Tracking

This is especially useful for special events. If you are doing event-based marketing, you can easily track its effectiveness by having a staff member manually count the people that are coming in the door. They can use clickers to count every single person that enters and keep track of cover charges they collect. With this information, you can compare the cost of having the event with the number of patrons. If you have a POS system, you can break down your sales and ROI even further.

Marketing Analysts

If you don’t have a lot of experience with marketing campaigns and promotions, you may want to bring in a marketing analyst to do all of the work for you. They will help keep track of your costs while calculating ROI. In most cases, marketing analysts will go above and beyond by breaking down every cost and using special formulas to compare the money you spent to the money you earned. They’ll also use a variety of methods to see the benefits of your marketing campaign that can’t be measured, such as customer satisfaction. They’ll use surveys and other resources to see how campaigns made potential customers react, ultimately helping you decide if the marketing was successful. Many analysts will also help you create a good strategy before you even begin the campaign to ensure that the money you spend is well worth the investment.

Determining your ROI is an important part of marketing. It can be done with a bit of simple math, the right technology, or an expert depending on the scope of your campaign. Either way, finding your ROI will help you create the most effective marketing tactics for your business. With a strategy and long-term goal in mind, you can create a successful marketing campaign with a high ROI for your business.